There are a lot of things to love about Texas, including breakfast tacos, beef brisket, and Lyle Lovett. When I was in Austin last week, Lyle Lovett stood behind me while I waited in line for beef brisket; my heart grew two sizes that day. But the loveliest thing about Texas is the fact that Texans love it so much.

Chesterton wrote, "Men did not love Rome because she was great; she was great because they had loved her." The same is true of Texas. I have come to love the state my own self, but I must say, to a visitor from Tennessee, the glories of Texas are not self-evident. One suspects that in a place so beloved, there must be more than meets the eye. So one looks again, and glories begin to reveal themselves. As Richard Wilbur says, "What love sees is true."

On my recent trips to Texas, I have often thought of the first chapter of Robert Farrar Capon's Supper of the Lamb, in which he speaks of the value of the amateur--literally, the person who is motivated by love of a thing:

The world…needs all the lovers--amateurs--it can get. It is a gorgeous place, full of clownish graces and beautiful drolleries, and it has enough textures, tastes, and smells to keep us intrigued for more time than we have. Unfortunately, however, our response to its loveliness is not always delight: it is, far more often than it should be, boredom. And that is not only odd, it is tragic; for boredom in not neutral--it is the fertilizing principle of unloveliness.

In such a situation, the amateur--the man who thinks heedlessness a sin and boredom a heresy--is just the man you need… The graces of the world are the looks of a woman in love; without the woman they could not be there at all; but without her lover, they would not quicken into loveliness. There, then, is the role of the amateur: to look the world back to grace.

Texans are forever looking their dusty country back to grace, and it quickens into loveliness like the bluebonnets. God bless them for it. God bless Texas.

Patrick lived at the end of the world. A Roman citizen, he was born and raised in Britain, the northern- and westernmost extremity of a Roman empire that extended (overextended, as it turned out) south to Africa and east to the Tigris and Euphrates.

I often run across people who are convinced that our culture is running hard toward rack and total ruin, but any sense of cultural doom that keeps you up at night is nothing to what a Roman Briton of Patrick’s era must have felt. The exact date of Patrick’s birth is unknown, but he was probably born within a decade of 410 AD, the year the Vandals sacked Rome. That same year the Emperor Honorius sent a letter to the cities of Britain putting them on notice that they were officially on their own; they could expect no more help from Rome. The letter was only a formality. The Roman army had withdrawn from Britain three years earlier; the Roman Britons were keenly aware of the fact that they were on their own.

Patrick’s real name—his Roman name—was Patricius, as in patrician, noble-born. A scion of a wealthy family, he grew up in a Roman villa, surrounded by British barbarians (the island was never very Romanized), who were themselves surrounded by Irish barbarians, Scottish barbarians, and Angles, Saxons, and Jutes on the continent. At the beginning of the fifth century, these barbarian tribes saw significant Roman wealth in Britain and no Roman army to protect it. You can probably guess what happened next.

Patrick was a teenager when Irish pirates kidnapped him, brought him back to Ireland, and sold him as a slave. He spent six years tending his owner’s sheep, often in very harsh conditions. Though he grew up in a Christian home (his father was a deacon and his grandfather was a priest in the Roman church), it was in the spiritual isolation of his Irish captivity that Patrick began to own his faith. He wrote, “I used to stay out in the forests and on the mountain and I would wake up before daylight to pray in the snow, in icy coldness, in rain, and I used to feel neither ill nor any slothfulness, because, as I now see, the Spirit was burning in me at that time.”

Six years into his slavery, Patrick heard a voice in the night suggesting that it was time to leave Ireland, so, to borrow a phrase from Raising Arizona’s Evelle Snoats, he released himself of his own recognizance. Through much hardship he made his way back to his family in Britain.

It was a joyous reunion. But Patrick hadn’t been home long when he had another dream-vision, in which he heard the voice of the Irish people saying, “We beg you, holy youth, that you shall come and shall walk again among us.” You may not be surprised to hear that his family was not happy when he told them that he intended to return to the island where he had been a slave and preach the gospel to the people who had enslaved him.

After a few years training as a priest, Patrick got himself appointed to a post in Ireland and spent the rest of his life there. He didn’t actually “bring” Christianity to the island. There was a small Christian population when he got there. Patrick, after all, was one of thousands of Roman Britons who had been carried off to Ireland by pirates and raiders, and many of those people would have been Christians. Those Christians began to have families; no doubt they converted some of their Irish neighbors. On top of that, merchants and sailors coming back and forth from the Continent and Britain may have added to the small population of Christians in Ireland. In any case, by 431 AD, there were enough believers in Ireland that Pope Celestine gave them their own bishop, a man named Palladius. So not only was Patrick not the first Christian in Ireland; he wasn’t even the first bishop.

Nevertheless, Patrick was immensely important in the spread of Christianity through Ireland. When his superiors sent him to Ireland, they were sending him to minister to the Christians who were already there, not to convert the barbarians. His insistence on reaching out to the pagans kept him in constant trouble with Church authorities. One Church official in Patrick’s time asked, “What place would God have in a savage world?” Another wrote “How could the Christian virtues survive among barbarians?”

By Patrick’s time—a century or so after Emperor Constantine gave official sanction to the Christian religion—a de facto orthodoxy had emerged that conflated Christianity with Roman civilization in much the same way that first-century Jewish Christians assumed that Christian practice would and should be shaped by Jewish cultural mores. By the end of the fourth century, the Church was as big as all the empire—but, it appeared, no bigger. It wasn’t obvious whether, in this close association between Church and state, the Church had conquered the empire, or the empire had conquered the Church. As the Empire began to crumble, the Church took on an even more important cultural role. In Britain, as in many parts of Northern Europe where the civil structures of Roman authority had evaporated, the Roman Church was the only significant Roman institution left.

In reaching out to the heathens of Ireland, Patrick was up against not only the hostility of the Irish themselves, but the hostility of his own Church. But the very thing that drove his superiors crazy is what the Irish loved about him. In bringing them the gospel, this Roman Briton left their Irishness intact. He was making Christians, not Romans. In the Western tradition, at least, the Irish were the first people ever to submit to Christianity without first submitting to the Roman Empire.

We could hardly overestimate the uniqueness of Patrick’s work among the Irish. As a pioneering missionary, his only real precedent was the apostle Paul. When Patrick took it upon himself to make disciples among the Irish, he became, so far as we know, Western Christendom’s first missionary to the world beyond the bounds of the Roman Empire. Paul’s journeys were an astonishing achievement, but even Paul never ventured beyond the empire of which he was a citizen. For that matter, Paul’s travels rarely took him even a hundred miles away from the Mediterranean Sea, the center of the Roman world. In reconciling Jew and Greek, Paul already had his work cut out for him; the barbarians hardly figured into the equation for him. For Patrick to reach out to the barbarians as he did was almost as radical as Paul’s outreach to the Gentiles.

So raise a glass of green beer to St. Patrick, patron saint of the Emerald Isle and, more importantly, a man who loved the gospel enough to rebel against his culture–and in doing so changed the world.

This is a re-post from five years ago. I've been thinking about the importance of paying attention, and this story came to mind...

A while back I was in the library checking my email on the public computers. The patrons of the library's public computers constitute what may politely be called a cross-section of humanity. At my library, they don't just let you sit at whichever computer you like. They assign you one, and it's right next to the person who sat down just before you did. Which is to say, there isn't any of that natural spacing of the discreet whereby two people in an elevator stand in the back corners and the third person stands in the middle right by the door. No, at the library computers you're spang up against the next fellow. The fellow I was spang up against was managing his account at an online dating site. He was a white-haired, paunchy old boy with a long, straight nose that ran bulged off to the left just at the tip-end, putting me in mind of a train that derailed right before pulling into the station. Every half-minute or so, he chuckled at something some dating prospect or other had written in her profile, wagging his head each time and cutting his eyes over toward me. Clearly he hoped I would ask him what he was laughing about or otherwise engage him in conversation. I was determined not to. I was in a bit of a hurry--just trying to check my email and get out of there--and I wasn't up to it anyway.

Soon my neighbor wandered away from the dating site and to a medical self-diagnosis site. He stopped chuckling and instead made little murmurs of interest--or maybe it was concern. I didn't take the bait. I was locked on to that email. At last the man nudged me with his elbow. He pointed at his screen. "How would you pronounce that word?" he asked.

I looked at his screen. "Splanchnoptosis, I guess." I went back to my email.

"Splanchnoptosis," he repeated. "Prolapse or backward displacement of an organ in the abdomen." He rubbed his ample belly. "I'm pretty sure that's what I've got," he said. I glanced in his direction and gave a quick, sympathetic nod, then looked off, hoping he would get the message.

The man turned his chair to face me. "You probably didn't know that you can cure cancer with baking soda, did you?"

It finally occurred to me that whatever my email said, it wasn't going to be nearly as interesting as the things this old boy had to say. I turned my chair too, and we were face to face.

"That's right," he said. "Some doctors in Italy taped pouches of baking soda under the armpits of women with breast cancer. Six weeks later, the tumors were gone. No surgery. No chemo. No radiation. I saw it on YouTube." He crossed his arms triumphantly, as if he had been one of the Italian doctors who made the discovery. "It's all about the pH levels."

He extended a thick right hand in my direction. "I'm David," he said.

I shook his hand. If I told him my name, I'm quite sure he didn't hear it. He was off again. "But there's no money in baking soda, is there? Where would the medical-industrial complex be if everybody was controlling their pH levels with baking soda and wasn't getting cancer? What would the doctors do? You can't make the mortgage on one of those doctor houses by selling baking powder, can you?"

David looked behind him as if to be sure nobody was eavesdropping, though he was speaking so excitedly now that I suppose everybody in the computer room could hear every word, unless they were wearing foam earplugs. He leaned in close. "You know who built all the hospitals, don't you?"

I shook my head.

"The Rockerfellers. That's who. The same Rockerfellers that are in charge of everything else. You think that's a coincidence, that the Rockerfellers built all those hospitals and the Rockerfellers are in charge of our health policy? You want to know why you didn't know baking soda is the cure for cancer?" He snorted disdainfully. "Ask the Rockerfellers. Only they won't tell you."

David gestured toward the people who were lined up outside the computer room for early voting. "It's like I told one of the women out there," he said. "I said, 'Do you really think you're smart enough to vote? Do you think you can outwit the military-medical-industrial complex? Because that's who runs things around here. Do you think you're smarter than the Rockerfellers?'"

To think my natural inclination was to ignore this guy.

"But there's no telling what women want, is there?" David said. I wasn't sure if that was a rhetorical question. "I know what women want," he said, "and I know how to give it to them." He leaned in even closer than before assumed a confidential tone. "They just want somebody who will listen."

I have a friend named Laura who shows up at our front door every now and then with a cake she's baked or a pot of soup she's cooked. "This is fabulous," she always says. "I want y'all to have some." There is neither pride nor false humility in her utterance, but bare, declarative fact. Everything she brings is fabulous.

Laura's motives, it appears to me, are as pure as any artist's motives could be. She loves food enough to perfect her art as a baker and cook. She loves her friends enough to share her creations with them. Her pride, her humility, her self-consciousness--none of these things seem to enter into the equation one way or another. She loves the work. She loves her audience.

Last week I wrote about self-forgetfulness. Laura on the front porch with her oven mitts is as good an example of creative self-forgetfulness as I can offer. "This is fabulous. I want y'all to have some."

That kind of self-forgetfulness in the face of one's own good work brings to mind one of my favorite passages from "The Weight of Glory," the sermon by C.S. Lewis. In heaven, Lewis writes, we will bask in the pleasure of God's approval. That may sound like the ultimate vanity. But, as Lewis argues, it is the purest, even the humblest pleasure of the creature, to please the One who made you for his pleasure.

There will be no room for vanity then. She will be free from the miserable illusion that it is her doing. With no taint of what we should now call self-approval she will most innocently rejoice in the thing God made her to be, and the moment which heals her old inferiority complex for ever will also drown her pride.

You write, presumably, because you have seen something in the world around you, and you want to show it to someone else. Why, then, do you spend so much of your writing time thinking about yourself? You're there at your desk, trying to work out the next sentence, and before you know it, you're thinking about yourself instead: your failures, your ego, your word-count goal. You speculate on how you're going to feel when you make your goal. You get a jump-start on the self-loathing you'll feel if you fall short. You wonder what people are going to think when they read what you've written. You wonder if anybody will even read it. You question whether anything you've ever written was actually good. You buck yourself up, remembering that, yes, you've written plenty of good pieces--brilliant pieces, in fact. Which makes you suspect that you've already used up all your brilliance. You think about your friend whose blog gets twice as many comments as yours, in spite of the fact that he can't write his way out of a paper bag. Then you ponder Edgar Allen Poe, who died penniless and alone in a Baltimore gutter. It occurs to you that you'll never write as well as Edgar Allen Poe. In short, it takes about 45 seconds to decide that you're the piece of crap that the universe revolves around.

Just in the writing of this little post, I have experienced this self-absorption in many forms. I was going to knock it out and post it last Wednesday. Wednesday came, then Friday, and I still hadn't sat down to write it. When Monday rolled around, I had officially missed my stated goal of posting once a week, and my teaching semester had started, so now I had something resembling an excuse, but also the nagging feeling that I was letting down the 140 people who had signed up for the Writers' Consortium...and being a bad example too. But since my post was overdue, I would need to make it extra-brilliant--more brilliant than I felt I was up for...

Saint Augustine (among others) spoke of sin as incurvatus in se--a curving in on the self. This truth is nowhere more evident than in the neuroses and dysfunctions that so often accompany the act of writing. Self-absorption, self-consciousness, self-promotion, self-loathing, self-justification, self-doubt, self-aggrandizement--incurvatus in se.

Writing demands a certain amount of introspection. But introspection doesn't have to become self-absorption. In my own writing life, I have found that writing can be a means toward blessed self-forgetfulness. As I get absorbed in a subject I'm writing about, find that I am freed from self-absorption--and I am able to do good work. When I stop asking "What will my reader think of me?" I start asking, "What will my reader think about this person or event or idea I'm writing about?" And good things start to happen. I don't live in that place all the time. I don't even live there most of the time. But I don't get much good writing done when I'm not in that place.

In APreface to Paradise Lost, C.S. Lewis evoked the idea of incurvatus in se as he explained why Satan rebelled against God and lost his place in heaven: "in the midst of a world of light and love, of song and feast and dance, [Satan] could think of nothing more interesting than his own prestige." I write because I live in a world that is full of wonders and I count it a privilege to point out a few of those wonders to a few of the people I share this world with. I write because I live in a world that's a whole lot more interesting than my own prestige. And yet I am forever stalling out because instead of looking outward at this astonishing world, I look inward. Instead of wondering at the world, I wonder what the world is going to think of me.

So here's my challenge to you, my writerly friend: be less introspective. Look outward at the world and at your reader, and leave yourself out of it. See what you see, and then write it down.

I've been looking over the goals articulated by the the 100+ writers who have joined the Further Up and Further In Writers' Consortium. They're pretty interesting. More than thirty of you hope to finish novels this year. About a dozen of you plan to write memoirs or family histories. A dozen of you are looking to write poems. A whole lot of you have committed to regular blogging (the Lord bless you and keep you…a blog is a hard master).

It was exhilarating to see what many of you hope to bring into the world: fiction for mentally handicapped high schoolers, a concept album based on GK Chesterton's Orthodoxy, a book about gluttony. Some of you are writing to chronicle or memorialize or work through pain--the pain of cancer, the pain of a hard season of ministry, the pain of watching a mother disappear into Alzheimer's.

Many of you stated your goals in terms of process rather than end product. You have committed to write every day, or once a week, or one Saturday every month. I admire you commitment to the work and your trust in the process, which can hardly help but yield good things.

I do get the sense that some of you view your process-driven goals as somehow humbler or less ambitious than the product-oriented goals--novels and memoirs and sonnet cycles. This is not true. Those writers with sexier goals will have to commit to the process too: they too will have to say, "I will write X hours on Y days of the week, starting at Z o'clock in the following location." Those of you who have committed to big, product-oriented goals, take a cue from your process-oriented peers. I will soon be asking you to describe the very mundane routine that you are willing to commit to.

Having said that, I do have a couple of questions for those of you who have defined your goals in terms of process rather than product. First, if you backslide some day or week or month--and you almost certainly will--what can you put in place to ensure that you get your butt back in the chair the next day rather than giving up on your goal (which, technically, you have already failed to accomplish)? If your "Read through the Bible in a Year" plan has ever crashed and burned somewhere around Leviticus 2, you know what I'm talking about. Have a plan that balances no-excuses rigor with a willingness to extend to yourself the same kind of generosity and mercy that you would extend to anybody else you love.

Here's my second question for those of you whose stated goals are entirely process-driven: are you sure you can get up and write every day (or every week or every month) without having a clear sense of the end product you're writing toward? I only ask because I know I can't. I can keep a very rigorous schedule if I'm finishing a chapter or an essay. But if I'm not pushing toward a clearly defined goal, I find the snooze button very tempting. I know there is real value in sitting down every day and keeping the pen moving to the rhythm of whatever is on your mind. Good things come out of that discipline. I've just never been able to do it with any consistency.

So to recap, if you are able to commit to the process without an end product in mind--if you are able, as T.S. Eliot suggests, to "take no thought of the harvest,/ but only of proper sowing," then good on you. Proceed with my blessing. But you also might find it helpful to commit to an end product.

In writing, as in may facets of life, it's important that you do do whatever works best for you--whatever keeps the pen moving across the page. But you should also be open to the possibility that you don't know what works best for you.

Next up: I reflect on your reactions to one another's goals and ponder how we prevent the Further Up and Further In Writers' Consortium from becoming a shame factory.

I've taken up running in recent years, and it's done me quite a lot of good. Besides feeling better physically, I have benefitted from knowing that I, an old dog, am still capable of learning new tricks. I'm not a natural runner; cultivating the discipline to do it has taught me lessons that have applied elsewhere in life, including my writing life. Here's the most important thing I've learned from running: when I find myself miles from home and exhausted already, I've learned not to ask, "Can I run all the way home?" The truth is, I usually don't know whether I can run all the way home. I have learned instead to ask, "Can I run to the next light pole?" The answer to that question is almost always "Yes." And once I've made it to the light pole, I start thinking about the next light pole.

Of the few books I've read about how to write, my favorite by far is Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird. That book has done much to shape my day-to-day approach to writing. Lamott compares writing a book to driving at night. Your headlights don't illuminate any farther than the next turning. But you keep going anyway, knowing that by the time you make that turn, your headlights will light the way to the next turn. And eventually you get where you set out to go.

Writing a book is a daunting task. Writing, like night-driving or distance running, requires a certain amount of faith. You set out for a destination without knowing exactly how you're going to get there. For me, at least, it helps to remember that I don't write books. I write sentences. A book is what you have after the fact. On any given day, I'm only writing pages. I'm only running to the next light pole.

Do you have a big writing goal for 2015? Do you want to write a novel? A memoir? A sonnet cycle? An opera? Do you find it difficult to know where to start or how to keep going? Further Up and Further In is a community of writers who have taken the (rather large) step of stating, "My writing goal for 2015 is ____________." Throughout the year, we will offer each other encouragement, accountability, advice, and--hopefully--a growing conviction that the long journey of the writer is worth the effort.

What should you expect from this consortium?

Good question. To some extent, we'll be defining the process as we go along, depending on what members of the group need. At least once a week I will post a consortium-related article here at jonathan-rogers.com. That article may be about the writing process or about crafting better sentences; it may answer a question that has come up in the consortium that week; it may be a writing prompt. These articles will be part of my regular blog and will be available to anybody who visits the site. Some of the consortium discussion, however, will take place in a private Facebook group inhabited only by those who have joined the consortium. For instance, you will state your writing goals, your schedule, etc., in that private group, not on the public blog. Though I am the host of the gathering, much of the value of the consortium will derive from the members' interaction with one another. Perhaps the most important function of this consortium is to provide a place for writers to say, "Here is my intention," and to be taken seriously by people who have stated a similar intention.

What should you NOT expect from this consortium?

In Further Up and Further In, we will not be discussing publishing issues such as finding an agent, writing pitch letters, marketing, etc. There are many excellent Internet resources on these topics; I'm sure you can find them. This consortium is all about the writing process and writerly craft. Also, while critique is a vitally important part of becoming a better writer, we won't be critiquing one another's work in this consortium. I ask that everyone refrain from posting excerpts from works-in-progress on the blog or in the Facebook group. I imagine that some of you will choose to share your work with one another. Please do so via direct communication--private messaging, email, etc.

How to join Further Up and Further In

To join our writers' consortium, fill out this short form. It simply asks for your name, your email address, and a few details about your 2015 writing goal. I will add you to the private Facebook group, and the next time you begin to doubt that you are a "real writer," you can remind yourself that you are a full member of a writer's consortium.

Originality may be the most overrated of the writerly virtues. Much more important is the skill of seeing what’s in front of you and rendering it faithfully. The world is a varied place; every person in it is a miracle; every setting is unusual; every event, every encounter is a thing that has never happened in the long history of the world. On top of all that variety is the fact that every observer’s vision is unique. If you will allow yourself to see what you see, and then write what you have seen, you can be sure that originality will take care of itself.

That’s not an easy thing to do. Few people write what they have seen. More often, they write what they think they ought to have seen, or they shoehorn experiences and people into familiar categories. It’s a hard habit to break; categorizing and sorting the firehose-blast of experiences and ideas that come our way is a necessary survival skill. But writing is different. Writing is a chance to release experience from man-made categories and say, “Look at this—this thing that exists in the real world.” Writing comes alive when you do that. Oddly enough, faithful imitation is the front door to originality.

Fifty summers ago, Flannery O'Connor was thirty-nine years old. She had battled lupus for most of her adult life, managing the disease with massive doses of corticosteroids, which themselves had serious side effects. As she wrote to a friend, "So far as I can tell, the medicine and the disease run neck & neck to kill you." In the spring of 1954, a major surgery reactivated O'Connor's dormant lupus; the tell-tale "lupus rash" broke through the protective steroid barrier, signaling that the disease was back in earnest. O'Connor spent a month in Atlanta's Piedmont Hospital--from May 21 to June 20.

A prodigious letter-writer, O'Connor kept up her correspondence from her hospital bed. Through her many hospital stays, she almost always kept up her letter-writing. But she tended to put off fiction-writing until she could get back to her typewriter. The fact that she wrote much of "Parker's Back" in Piedmont Hospital, in longhand, suggests a sense of urgency that was unusual for this most deliberate writer.

The other day my sister, a teacher, was trying to help a student fill out some form or other. The form asked for Date of Birth. The girl knew her birthday, but the idea of a birth date, a specific day of a specific year, had her baffled. "The day you were born," my sister said, a little exasperated, "what year was that?" The little girl was exasperated herself. She gave my sister a squint and, teeth clenched, said, "A little baby don't know what year it is."

When I sat down to write The Charlatan's Boy, the first sentence I wrote turned out to be the first sentence of the finished product: "I don't remember one thing about the day I was born." Grady, the narrator, is grappling with the same epistemological dilemma that was troubling my sister's student. Anything you think you know about your birth, your origins, is something you got second-hand. Somebody has to tell you where you came from and how you got here. Grady's troubles stem from the fact that the one person he knows who might be able to tell him anything about his origins is a liar and a fraud.

There is a moment in Chapter 4 of The Bark of the Bog Owl that makes me cringe a little bit. Aidan and Dobro have gotten mixed up with a panther, which “bared its fangs and wailed a deep rumbling moan that became a piercing scream.” It’s not a bad description, but it’s not what I wrote. The panther wasn’t supposed to wail. Panthers waul. It’s the perfect verb for what panthers do. But a well-meaning editor at B&H Publishing Group changed waul to wail (just as my computer’s auto-correct did just now), and I didn’t notice until after the book was published. So since 2004 that poor panther has been going against his own nature, wailing instead of wauling for nine years.
I have good news for the panther. The rights to the Wilderking Trilogy reverted to me last year after a period in which the books were effectively (though not technically) out of print. The Bark of the Bog Owl, The Secret of the Swamp King, and The Way of the Wilderking are coming back with a new publisher: Rabbit Room Press. And I have been able to fix some of the little things that have been bothering me about the published versions. The new and improved paperback versions of the three books will be officially release on April 1. And in the Rabbit Room edition the panther wauls (though–spoiler alert–he still doesn’t survive Chapter 4).

I am thankful for B&H’s support of the Wilderking in years past; I long ago recovered from the shock of having a B&H salesman suggest that I make Dobro Turtlebane a girl (girls read far more than boys, he reasoned, and they needed a character to relate to). Still, bringing Aidan and Dobro and them to the Rabbit Room Press feels like a kind of homecoming.

You don't have to wait until April, however. Preorder now at the Rabbit Room store, and you'll get your books in early March. Just as importantly, preorders will make it possible for us print more books in the initial print run, reducing printing costs significantly. Click here for the Rabbit Room store. Order all three Wilderking books to save 10%.

Recycling from a couple of years ago...
It's Ash Wednesday. Yesterday my friend Father Thomas, an Anglican priest, burned the palm fronds from last year's Palm Sunday to make the ashes to rub on people's foreheads today. "Remember that you are dust," he will say to them, "and to dust you shall return."

I didn't grow up observing Ash Wednesday or Lent, but I have to say, at this age it helps to be reminded that I am dust and returning to dust. It's not just a help, but a comfort. This world is forever demanding that we take it as seriously as it takes itself, and it tempts us to take ourselves too seriously too. Ash Wednesday says, "No, no, no, dear sinner. You're just dust, living in a world that's just dust, and you and the world both are returning to dust. And you are dear to God nevertheless."

I love the prayer in the Anglican Ash Wednesday liturgy:

Almighty and everlasting God, you hate nothing you have made and forgive the sins of all who are penitent: Create and make in us new and contrite hearts, that we, worthily lamenting our sins and acknowledging our wickedness, may obtain of you, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

I used to associate Ash Wednesday--when I considered it at all--with self-flagellation. But, as the apostle Paul said, it is the kindness of God that leads us to repentance--the confidence that God hates nothing he has made and forgives the sins of all who are penitent.

For all my ambivalence about T.S. Eliot, there are passages in his poem "Ash Wednesday" that I just love. The lines I love the most in that poem, the lines that most perfectly capture the spirit of the day, are these:

Lord, I am not worthy
Lord, I am not worthy
but speak the word only.

"I'm not worthy." True enough. But not the truest thing. The Lord speaks truer things into being every day.

So happy Ash Wednesday, you old sinner. You are dust, and to dust you shall return. And God loves you anyway.

I'm terribly sorry about my absence right in the middle of the Summer Reading Club. I hope to circle back around to the stories we missed--"Greenleaf," "A View of the Woods," and "The Enduring Chill." Meanwhile, I figured it was best just to pick up with the story that was scheduled for this week.

Flannery O'Connor referred to "Everything that Rises Must Converge" as "my reflection on the race situation." Indeed, though race figures into most of her stories one way or another, “Everything That Rises” is the only story that so consciously and directly addresses the changing dynamics of race in the South as a “situation.” The story mostly takes place on a city bus, that crucible of racial politics in the American South of the 1950s and ’60s.

Julian and his mother form a dyad that we have seen already in "Good Country People" and that also appears in "The Enduring Chill"--the the overbearing mother and the over-educated, progressive, and naive adult child. Then there is the mother’s black doppelgänger. She personifies the convergence that will inevitably result from the rising fortunes of African Americans. The white characters—the liberal no less than the reactionary—find that they are ill-prepared for such a convergence.

One of the most remarkable things about this story, I think, is the fact that in the end it turns out not to be a reflection on "the race situation" after all. O'Connor could have hardly chosen a setting that was more politically/racially charged. She wrote the story in the spring of 1961. Just five years earlier, Rosa Parks's act of civil disobedience launched the Montgomery bus boycott. That spring--1961--saw the Freedom Riders traveling the South in buses. And yet, on Flannery O'Connor's bus, the most important dynamics at play are family dynamics, not racial dynamics. The more I reflect on this story, the more I realize how little it has to say about "the race situation" in the segregated South. O'Connor never adjudicates between Julian's views and those of his mother. Both of them are wrong about the black woman and her son, and for the same reasons: neither sees black their black neighbors as fully human. Julian rejects his mother's supremacist views, but for his purposes, the black mother and son are useful symbols, not actual people. The white mother's patronizing of the little boy is matched by Julian's patronizing of the black mother.

Julian's great revelation at the end of the story has little or nothing to do with race. The black woman and son are gone, and he is left alone with his dying mother. When he enters into “the world of guilt and sorrow,” his guilt is over his sins against his mother, not over his or his society's sins against the black woman on the bus or black people generally. Perhaps O’Connor’s “reflection on the race situation” is that even as the races rise and converge, we are still accountable to one another as individuals, not as races. As deep as the “race problem” goes, it is still not our deepest problem; it is one of the most obvious symptoms of our deeper problem of sin.

I'm at the beach this week, so I'll keep this short and rely on you, dear reader, to do the heavy lifting--which you often do anyway.
The irony in "Good Country People" is thick and layered. The joke is on Joy-Hulga, and it is an especially mean joke--or, in any case, it appears to be. But the episode in the hayloft, ironically, is also an offer of grace. Hulga has poured her whole self into that wooden leg (I'll let you work out all the symbolism contained therein). It's what she has instead of a soul ("She took care of it as someone else would his soul, in private and almost with her own eyes turned away.") For this devilish figure, the Bible salesman, to take her wooden leg is the cruelest thing he could do. It is as if he is stealing her soul. Except that being stripped of that ugly idol of self is exactly what Joy-Hulga needs from a spiritual standpoint.

I don't know that there is any evidence in the story that Joy-Hulga receives grace. But the shock of self-realization, as painful as it is, is at least a step in that direction. A few weeks ago we discussed O'Connor's idea that the devil is always achieving ends that are not his own. Do you see that dynamic at work in this story?

Happy Wednesday, FOC summer reading clubbers, and forgive my tardiness in posting this week. I haven't relished the thought of having the "n-word" prominently displayed on my blog for all search engines to find. But it probably is time we addressed the question of race in O'Connor's fiction.
By way of entry into the question of race, I will tell you a story about the editorial process for my forthcoming O'Connor biography, The Terrible Speed of Mercy (which, I recently learned, has a new publication date of August 22, six weeks from today). The book had gone through a few rounds of edits when somebody at Thomas Nelson said, "Wait just a minute...we don't use the 'n-word' in books published by Thomas Nelson." A perfectly legitimate concern.

Indeed, the n-word appears thirteen times in my manuscript, and twice before you even make it out of the introduction. One solution would have been to "bleep out" the word, substituting "n-----" for the offending word. But eight of those thirteen instances appear in the title "The Artificial Nigger." Which is a problem insofar as you can't very well bleep out part of a story title. Somebody raised the possibility of keeping the title intact, bleeping out the other five instances of the n-word, and writing a Publisher's Note explaining that, as far as that particular word goes, things were different in O'Connor's time. I didn't much like that solution, largely on the grounds that the word--especially among O'Connor's readership--was as offensive then as it is now.

Lest you think this is a story of a publisher being overly cautious and politically correct, let me say that Thomas Nelson was correct to think long and hard before putting out a book that includes thirteen instances of a word as inflammatory as that. In the end the publishing team decided to leave the manuscript as it was in and include the following note at the beginning:

A Note About Diction

A highly offensive racial slur occurs some thirteen times throughout this book, in each case quoted from Flannery O'Connor's fiction or correspondence. The publishing team discussed at some length how best to handle this word in light of the sensibilities of twenty-first century readers. In the end, we decided to let the word stand in its full offensiveness, on the grounds that the repugnance the reader feels at the word is a key reason O'Connor used it in the first place. It may be true that there was more open racism in the 1950s and 1960s than in the twenty-first century, but that hardly explains why O'Connor used the "n-word" in the thirteen instances quoted in this book. A reader of literary fiction in the 1950s would be no less offended by the word than a reader of literary fiction in 2012. To expurgate O'Connor's language would be to suggest that we understand its offensiveness better than she does, or perhaps to suggest that the readers of this book are more easily offended than O'Connor's original audience. We have no reason to believe that either is true. So we leave O'Connor's language intact, and we leave you with this warning: you may find some of the language in this book offensive; that is as it should be.

So then, race in "The Artificial Nigger." It is common in O'Connor's fiction to see white characters express racist attitudes. I can't think of a single instance of O'Connor endorsing those attitudes in any of her stories or novels. From a race perspective, the troubling thing about "The Artificial Nigger" isn't that a couple of hillbillies turn out to be racist. More troublesome is the fact that this is one of the few O'Connor stories in which a character clearly sees the error in his ways and appears to receive the offer of grace. And yet Mr. Head's racism doesn't get fixed.

Consider this remarkable moment at the end of the story, when Mr. Head realizes what an awful thing he has done in denying his grandson:

He stood appalled, judging himself with the thoroughness of God, while the action of mercy covered his pride like a flame and consumed it. He had never thought himself a great sinner before but he saw now that his true depravity had been hidden from him lest it cause him despair. He realized that he was forgiven for sins from the beginning of time. . . . He saw that no sin was too monstrous to claim as his own, and since God loved in proportion as He forgave, he felt ready at that instant to enter Paradise.

This moment of self-awareness immediately follows a moment of reconciliation between Nelson and Mr. Head. And that moment of reconciliation is signaled by their sharing of a joke--an unmistakably racist joke!

What I'm suggesting is that if you or I were were writing a story about a racist coming face-to-face with his own sin, you or I would probably show him becoming less of a racist. Not Flannery O'Connor.

What do you make of that?

Bonus reading recommendation: The best discussion of O'Connor and race and sin and redemption can be found in Ralph C. Wood's book, Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South, Chapter 3.

What do you make of the fact that the local preachers band together to shut down the carnival at the end of "A Temple of the Holy Ghost"? It seems clear that the freak show (or, in any case, a second-hand account of the freak show) brings our young protagonist closer to a place where she is ready for the Eucharist to do its work on her. That being the case, there is a certain irony in the preachers shutting the thing down. On the other hand, if part of the preachers' job is to raise the moral tone of a community, you can hardly blame them for taking a stand against freak shows in general and the hermaphrodite's unseemly exhibit in particular.
I'll just throw this little tidbit out there as a discussion starter: In one of her letters, Flannery O'Connor wrote, "I think most people come to the Church by means the Church does not allow, else there would be no need their getting to her at all." I suspect that quotation has some bearing on this question. (Forgive me for wrenching that quotation entirely out of context; you can find it on p. 93 of Habit of Being if you prefer your quotations in context).

For those who view Flannery O'Connor's fiction as a freak show, "A Temple of the Holy Ghost" would appear to be Exhibit A. Its most memorable scene describes a hermaphrodite in an actual carnival freak show. But O'Connor doesn't offer up the hermaphrodite simply as an object of curiosity for gawkers and voyeurs. She doesn't, in other words, offer up this freak in the spirit of the freak show. The hermaphrodite, to my way of thinking, is surprisingly human, a figure of pathos and even a strange dignity, calling the audience to a civility and charity that one wouldn't necessarily expect from freak show attendees:

"This is the way [God] wanted me to be, and I ain't disputing His way. I'm showing you because I got to make the best of it. I expect you to act like ladies and gentlemen. I never done it to myself nor had a thing to do with it but I'm making the best of it. I don't dispute hit."

I realize that my impression of the hermaphrodite's dignity is subjective and that another reader might interpret his/her speech entirely differently. A better clue to the meaning of the hermaphrodite comes from the Tantum ergo, the Latin hymn sung by the Catholic schoolgirls on the porch and sung again during the benediction at the convent. The hymn was written by Thomas Aquinas, whom O'Connor read every night before bed. Here is a translation of the first stanza:

Down in adoration falling,
Lo! the sacred Host we hail,
Lo! o'er ancient forms departing
Newer rites of grace prevail;
Faith for all defects supplying
Where the feeble senses fail.

The hermaphrodite, like the rest of the freaks in O'Connor's fiction, stands for all of us, broken and needing the grace that supplies our defects. The people who go to the freak show expecting to see a sub-human creature are instead challenged to be more humane, more charitable.

O'Connor once helped some nurse-nuns in an Atlanta with a book called A Memoir of Mary Ann. Mary Ann was a little girl in their hospital whose face was terribly deformed by cancer, but who shone nevertheless with a loveliness that made an indelible impression on everyone who met her. O'Connor wrote the introduction to the book, and in it she provides perhaps the best explanation of what the grotesquerie in her fiction means. I expect to write more about "An Introduction to A Memoir to Mary Ann" in a later post, but for now here is a quotation from the piece that is relevant to the hermaphrodite in "A Temple of the Holy Ghost":

This action by which charity grows invisibly among us, entwining the living and the dead, is called by the Church the Communion of Saints. It is a communion created upon human imperfection, created from what we make of our grotesque state.

That call to charity is one important role that the hermaphrodite plays in "A Temple of the Holy Ghost"; the twelve-year-old at the center of the story is deeply uncharitable from our first sight of her. She is also beset by an unearned and premature sense of her own superiority. It is the story of the hermaphrodite that brings her face-to-face with the truth that she is living in the midst of mysteries that she cannot fathom. The story of the hermaphrodite is to her "the answer to a riddle that was more puzzling than the riddle itself." That, perhaps, is the hermaphrodite's most important role in the story. When the girl finally understands how little she understands about the world she lives in, she is a step closer to receiving the grace that can make up for her shortcomings.

To return to the Tantum ergo, the hermaphrodite's story is where "the feeble senses fail" for our protagonist. The Eucharist bridges the gap that her human wits cannot cross. Where the girl's judgmental self-satisfaction had always held sway, "newer rites of grace prevail." That great blood-soaked elevated Host of the sun makes a red dirt road across the heavens, inviting her to something new.

Did FO write these stories with all sorts of symbols and hidden meanings like a rich treasure hunt waiting for persistent readers, or was she writing good stories with some meat to chew on? I'm just wondering if I should be thinking every detail is important to extra meaning or just a detail important to setting a mood or a backdrop for her story. (And yes, the answer can be both, but some writers lean more one way or the other.)

That's a tricky question, and one that gets at the very heart of what we're doing in the Flannery O'Connor Summer Reading Club. Madeleine is asking, in effect, "How do we get from the concrete details of the story to the meaning of the story?" If there's a more fundamental (or important) question a reader can ask, I don't know what it is.

The last thing I would want to do would be to dissect O'Connor's stories (or anybody's stories) in such a way that they are drained of the pleasure that is to be had in them. If I had to choose between enjoying a story and understanding it, I would choose to enjoy it every time. However, I'm convinced that, when it comes to reading, enjoyment is one of the surest paths toward understanding. So was Flannery O'Connor. She wrote:

In most English classes the short story has become a kind of literary specimen to be dissected. Every time a story of mine appears in a Freshman anthology, I have a vision of it, with its little organs laid open, like a frog in a bottle.

I realize that a certain amount of this what-is-the-significance has to go on, but I think something has gone wrong in the process when, for so many students, the story becomes simply a problem to be solved, something which you evaporate to get Instant Enlightenment.

A story isn't really any good unless it successfully resists paraphrase, unless it hangs on and expands in the mind. Properly, you analyze to enjoy, but it's equally true that to analyze with any discrimination, you have to have enjoyed already, and I think that the best reason to hear a story read is that it should stimulate that primary enjoyment. (Mystery and Manners p. 108)

So then, whatever we do with the concrete details of O'Connor's stories, let us not turn our reading into an exercise in dissection. O'Connor told a story about a run-in with an English teacher: "'Miss O'Connor,' he said, 'why was the Misfit's hat black?' I said most countrymen in Georgia wore black hats.' He looked pretty disappointed." There is symbolism in O'Connor, but I don't think symbol-hunting is especially helpful as an initial approach to a story. A good fiction writer uses concrete details to create a world that the reader can believe and inhabit. If those concrete details can also serve as symbols, all the better.*

There is a kind of symbol that is more or less arbitrary. We all agree that a wedding ring is a symbol of marriage. But it's a symbol only because we choose to agree it's a symbol; I've heard the preacher say the thing about the ring having no beginning and no end, etc. etc., but if somebody hadn't told me that a gold band was a symbol of holy matrimony, I wouldn't have guessed it in a hundred years. Consider, on the other hand, the car in "The Life You Save May Be Your Own." It's a symbol too, but a very different kind of symbol than the wedding ring. It symbolizes freedom, independence, a sense of being unmoored, for better or for worse. And anybody who has ever turned sixteen understands that without needing any explanation. When Mr. Shiftlet's yearns after the Craters' car, there is symbolism at work, but it's not a secret code by any means. Or consider Mr. Shiftlet's missing arm; it's an outward expression of an inward incompleteness and brokenness; it's a symbol. But it's a "natural" symbol--something that any reader is equipped to pick up on if he or she is paying attention.

So when Madeleine asks if O'Connor included "symbols and hidden meanings" in her stories, I would have to say that there are plenty of symbols, but I don't think there are all that many hidden meanings. In the comments on the previous post, there was some discussion about what peacocks represent in traditional symbology. I don't mean to suggest that those discussions are irrelevant or uninteresting, but they are secondary to what O'Connor offers right there in the plain text:

The priest let his eyes wander toward the birds. They had reached the middle of the lawn. The cock stopped suddenly and curving his neck backwards, he raised his tail and spread it with a shimmering timbrous noise. Tiers of small pregnant suns floated in a green-gold haze over his head. The priest stood transfixed, his jaw slack. Mrs. McIntyre wondered where she had ever seen such an idiotic old man. "Christ will come like that," he said in a loud gay voice and wiped his hand over his mouth and stood there, gaping.

The peacock symbolizes glory because anybody who has ever seen a peacock knows that it is glorious.

Or to return to the Misfit's black hat, there is a long tradition in American storytelling whereby black hats represent bad men. Okay, but of all the ways O'Connor shows us that the Misfit is a bad man, surely that is one of the least interesting and least compelling. An English teacher stands in front of Flannery O'Connor herself, and that's what he wants to talk about? A serial killer wearing the kind of hat that old boys in Georgia wore in the 1950s--I'm more interested in that detail as a piece of world-building than as a symbol of evil. And, as Madeleine has observed already, it can be both.

I want to conclude with one more observation that is not directly related to Madeleine's question but is relevant to the larger project of the Flannery O'Connor Summer Reading Club. I have written at some length about the fact that there is typically a moment of revelation (which is also a moment of violence) in an O'Connor story, and that in that moment, a main character has an opportunity to receive grace. I still think that's one helpful way into a story. But I don't want to give the impression that I have given you the formula for reading and understanding all of O'Connor's work. These stories are complex--and none of her short stories are more complex than "The Displaced Person." The "moment of revelation" is just one tool on the reader's tool belt. Keep pulling out your other tools.

*An allegory works the other way around, by the way; any concrete detail is there to symbolize some abstraction, and if it helps to create an inhabitable world, that's ok too. I have to say, however, that I don't really know of any allegories that depict an inhabitable world. That's why I'm not very interested in allegory--not even Pilgrim's Progress. (I realize I'm not supposed to say that out loud.)

In the summer of 1953, Flannery O'Connor's mother Regina hired a new farm laborer named Matysiak. He and his family moved into one of the houses at Andalusia, the O'Connor's dairy farm. Originally from Poland, the Matysiaks were among the millions of Europeans who were left homeless at the end of World War II. Thousands of these "Displaced Persons" ended up in the United States, and a few of them made their way to Middle Georgia.
The Matysiaks seemed to work out well enough at Andalusia; there were no catastrophes comparable to those of "The Displaced Person," the story that O'Connor wrote in the fall of 1953, just after the Matysiaks moved in. Nevertheless, there were cultural barriers to overcome. In one of her letters, O'Connor depicted a scene in which Regina and her dairyman's wife (identified as Mrs. P. in The Habit of Being) were making curtains out of chicken feed sacks for the Displaced Persons' house:

Regina was complaining that the green sacks wouldn’t look so good in the same room where the pink ones were and Mrs. P. (who has no teeth on one side of her mouth) says in a very superior voice, “Do you think they’ll know what colors even is?

While "The Displaced Person" is by no means autobiographical, Flannery O'Connor draws from her immediate surroundings in ways that we haven't yet seen in the stories we have read together. The dairy farm where the story is set is clearly a version of Andalusia, right down to the peacocks. More important than the physical setting are the social dynamics of the place. The efficient, energetic, no-nonsense Mrs. McIntyre is a version of Regina O'Connor, who ran her dairy farm as a mostly benevolent dictator, complaining constantly about the help and the peacocks. We will see various iterations of this character throughout the stories we read this summer (she makes her first appearance in "A Circle in the Fire," a story that we skipped). The Shortleys are an amalgam of the white families who came and went (and sometimes came back) every few years at Andalusia. And Astor and Sulk, the two black dairy workers, are lifted straight from the letters in which O'Connor describes the black families who were a fixture at Andalusia.

The white landowner, the itinerant white help, and the black help, who have no choice but to stay, form a triangle that is dysfunctional, inefficient, unjust, but surprisingly stable. Everybody knows his or her place, everybody complains about his or her place, but everybody depends on everybody else. By introducing the Displaced Person into the dynamic, Mrs. McIntyre disrupts the equilibrium and sets the story in motion.

Mr. Guizac, the Displaced Person, displaces every other person in the story. In his fundamental decency, nothing has prepared him to navigate the social complexities of the world he now finds himself in. Consider Mrs. Shortley's assessment of Mr. Guizac's interaction with Sulk and Astor:

When Gobblehook first come here, you recollect how he shook their hands, like he didn't know the difference, like he might have been as black as them, but when it come to finding out Sulk was taking turkeys, he gone on and told her. I known he was taking turkeys. I could have told her myself.

Mr. Guizac shook Sulk's hand for the same reason he ratted him out: he viewed his black co-workers as human beings, worthy of a handshake and also accountable for their actions. The other whites in the story don't do Sulk the dignity of expecting honesty from him--a state of affairs that confuses Guizac:

Mrs. McIntyre told [Sulk] to go put the turkey back and then she was a long time explaining to the Pole that all Negroes will steal. She finally had to call Rudolph and tell him in English and have him tell his father in Polish, and Mr. Guizac had gone off with a startled disappointed face.

It is the Shortleys who are the most conscious of the threat presented by the Displaced Person. If indeed there are "ten million billion" people ready to come and do an honest day's work for an honest day's pay, there will be no place for the Shortleys. No wonder Mrs. Shortley begins to view Mr. Guizac as evil incarnate. In his smile she sees Europe stretched out, "mysterious and evil, the devil's experiment station." The black workers, for their part, don't feel especially threatened. As Astor tells Sulk, "your place too low for anybody to dispute with you for it."

Mrs. McIntyre, on the other hand, is at first delighted with the idea of the equilibrium being upset. She understands how much the sorriness of her workers, white and black, is costing her. Within the class structure as it has existed in her world, Mrs. McIntyre has had few options. She is too tight with money to pay her workers well, so she has paid instead in other ways--the instability of white workers coming and going, or the occasional stolen turkey. Mr. Guizac represents a whole new way of doing things. He is smart, energetic, and thrifty, and he works for cheap. To Mrs. McIntyre's way of thinking, the Displaced Person's displacing of the Shortleys and their ilk is the best thing that could happen. She is a pragmatist, not an idealist.

But as it turns out, Mrs. McIntyre's pragmatism is no match for her racism. When she finds out that Mr. Guizac plans to marry his cousin off to Sulk, all bets are off. Her tacit racism flares into an especially ugly speech. "Mr. Guizac! You would bring this poor innocent child over here and try to marry her to an half-witted thieving black stinking nigger! What kind of a monster are you!" And suddenly she does see him as a monster, just as Mrs. Shortley had. She sees his very face as a patched-together, monstrous thing. She goes on to explain to Mr. Guizac that even if a black man can marry a white woman in Europe, it can't be done in the American South. That was a legal fact, by the way. Miscegenation laws forbade interracial marriage in many states (including Georgia) until they were struck down by the Supreme court in the 1967 Loving v. Virginia case.

Now, for the first time, the pragmatic Mrs. McIntyre begins to speak of her situation in moral and religious terms.

"I cannot understand how a man who calls himself a Christian," she said, "could bring a poor innocent girl over here and marry her to something like that. I cannot understand it. I cannot!"

Mr. Guizac, still not comprehending the mores of the society he has been dropped into, takes a much more humane view of his cousin's situation. "'She no care he black,' he said. 'She in camp three year.'"

In Part III of the story, Mrs. McIntyre's struggle is more overtly religious than economic or social. I love the cross-threaded conversation she has with the priest after finding out about Mr. Guizac's scheme. She is trying to explain her actions in practical terms, but the priest insists on seeing it in moral and theological terms. Ultimately he is so entranced by the peacock, that symbol of transcendence, that he scarcely hears what Mrs. McIntyre is saying to him.

"He has nowhere to go," he said. Then he said, "Dear lady, I know you well enough to know you wouldn't turn him out for a trifle!" And without waiting for an answer he raised his hand and gave her his blessing in a rumbling voice.

She smiled angrily and said, "I didn't create this situation, of course."

The priest let his eyes wander toward the birds. They had reached the middle of the lawn. The cock stopped suddenly and curving his neck backwards, he raised his tail and spread it with a shimmering timbrous noise. Tears of small pregnant suns floated in a green golden haze over his head. The priest stood transfixed, his jaw slack. Mrs. McIntyre wondered where she had ever seen such an idiotic old man. "Christ will come like that," he said in a loud gay voice and stood there, gaping.

Mrs. McIntyre's face assumed a set puritanical expression and she reddened. Christ in the conversation embarrassed her the way sex had her mother. "It is not my responsibility that Mr. Guizac has nowhere to go," she said. "I do not find myself responsible for all the extra people in the world."

The old man did not seem to hear her. His attention was fixed on the cock, who was taking minute steps backward, his head against the spread tail. "The transfiguration," he murmured.

She had no idea what he was talking about. "Mr. Guizac didn't have to come here in the first place," she said, giving him a hard look.

The cock lowered his tail and began to pick grass.

"He didn't have to come in the first place," she repeated, emphasizing each word.

The old man smiled absently. "He came to redeem us," he said and blandly reached for her hand and shook it and said he must go.

For the remainder of the story, Mrs. McIntyre struggles mightily with her conscience. It is to her credit that she struggles rather than ignoring the priest altogether, as much as she would like to. "She felt she had been tricked by the old priest. He had said that there was no legal obligation for her to keep the Displaced Person if he was not satisfactory, but then he had brought up the moral one." In her next conversation with the priest, Mrs. McIntyre finally identifies what exactly is at stake in her opposition to the D.P. Mr. Guizac. "As far as I'm concerned," she said and glared at him fiercely, "Christ was just another D.P."

Jesus, like Mr. Guizac, disturbs the equilibrium of a world that has learned to live with its own brokenness. As the Misfit said, "He thrown everything off balance."

Mrs. McIntyre would appear to have two options: she can receive the Displaced Person and accept a new equilibrium, or she can reject him and go back to the old dysfunction. In the end, she chooses to reject the Displace Person, conspiring with Mr. Shortley and Sulk to murder the man who had upset the old balance. "[Mrs. McIntyre] had felt her eyes and Mr. Shortley's eyes and the Negro's eyes come together in one look that froze them in collusion forever, and she had heard the little noise the Pole made as the tractor wheel broke his backbone." With the D.P. out of the way, the old triad of landowner, white dairyman, and black laborer, it appears, should be able to pick up where it left off.

However, the death of the Displaced Person does not make it possible for everyone to resume his or her place in the old order. Everyone is displaced, including the landowner herself. Mr. Guizac "thrown everything off balance."

As I have remarked before, grace is extended in all of O'Connor's stories. I read this story as one of the ones in which that proffered grace is rejected. However, I could be convinced otherwise. It could be that being displaced from the farm is exactly what Mrs. McIntyre needed. The picture of the old priest faithfully coming by and teaching her the doctrines of the church is hopeful. What do you think?

"The Displaced Person" is a long and complex story, and I scarcely touched on some of the most important parts--Mrs. Shortley's stroke, at the end of Part I, for instance, or her prophetic utterances, or the satanic imagery around Mr. Shortley in Part III, or O'Connor's portrayal of the black characters, or the peacocks. I'm hoping to touch on some of these questions later in the week, but feel free to address any of them in the comments below.